Client: Thomson Reuters is a global financial information and software company serving more than 20 million business people every day. One of its main offerings is Quantitative Research solutions – financial software and data applications for quantitative researchers, portfolio managers and technical analysts that help identify insights to grow portfolios faster. Strategic Systems International (SSI) was for years a development partner for Thomson Reuters and a precursor firm, Quantitative Analytics. Together, they redesigned and re-launched MarketQA, which integrates a functional language with historical and daily-updated fundamental and pricing data and offers financial data retrieval and analysis.

Challenge: Prior to the project, the MarketQA user interface was suboptimal. It used a non-relational database using outdated C++ app development software. The user interface lacked intuitiveness, and application performance lagged. The competition was far ahead of Thomson Reuters in feature set and using newer technologies with better, faster and more intuitive user experiences.The company was aware of these issues but was stymied in recreating the application on newer technologies due to a lack of resources and skill sets.

Solution: The client partnered with SSI to develop and support the product leveraging SSI’s longstanding relationship with Microsoft and its competence in cutting-edge technologies. SSI successfully architected and delivered an innovative and easy-to-use.NET user interface which, apart from being user-friendly, integrates and supports the legacy application features. SSI built the application using.Net Framework 2.0, C # 2005. The project took well over a year to complete. SSI wound up taking the project lead.

Result: SSI built an app with a sophisticated drag and drop interface – a modern looking interface with a query language that will highlight words so the user knows whether a word is a variable or a constant, a function or a parameter. This application was very well received in the market. More than five years after it debuted, it remains Thomson Reuter’s flagship product in quantitative analytics.